Taking Your Content to Your Audience with Bayley Dietz

Lindsay Tjepkema: Wherever the audience is, so too are the marketers. If you're a marketer, you know this is a fundamental truth. Wherever the people go, that's where we'll go. And podcasting is no different. With every new marketing fad, some short lived and others long lasting, you'll see a flood of marketers trying to master that thing, to Build brand awareness, attract leads, and win customers and podcasting my friend is no different. But, is podcast right for you? Does it fit into your strategy? And more importantly, is it something that your audience will actually benefit? I'm Lindsay Tjepkema CEO and co founder of Casted. The first and only marketing platform built around branded podcasts. And this is our podcast. Today, we're sitting down with Bailey Dietz, senior marketing manager at OpenView, and one of the hardworking marketers behind The Build podcast. When talking with her about their audience, it's clear that OpenView is doing something really right. Every week, they send out a blog roundup to their 100,000 subscribers. Yep. You heard that right. 100, 000 blog subscribers. So with such a successful blogging network, why podcasting? Simple, the team at OpenView saw an opportunity to go to a channel that was popular among their audience, a chance to get into their head, or you might even say their headphones. Bailey took us behind the scenes at OpenView and gave us an inside look at creating The Build Podcast and how they make it so sticky. It has to do with the amazing network of leaders that company has. We also dive into their podcasts and how it fits into their overall content strategy and how the team uses podcasts to create even more content for their brand. Let's dive in so you can hear just how Bailey and her team plan create and promote their podcast as well as Bailey's advice for anyone just getting started in the podcasting game.

Bailey Dietz: Great. So my name is Bailey Dietz. I am the senior marketing manager at OpenView and the title of our podcast is Build.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Awesome. So thank you so much for being here, Bailey. I am so excited to hear your role with Build and how it came together. So let's get started there. What's the story behind the podcast?

Bailey Dietz: Yeah, so our podcast has been around for about three years now. It's crazy to think about it. Time truly does fly and we've released about 85 episodes now. So going back when we first started out, everyone was doing podcasts. It was a time where, I don't want to say we necessarily jumped on the bandwagon, but we found a lot of our content readers from our blog were also listening to podcasts. It was very much the community that we wanted to target. People walking to work, commuting on the train, driving into work, everyone who is reading our blog we wanted to target them in another way and use another channel with different content.

Lindsay Tjepkema: So one thing that I always talk to people about when they're like, Oh, I want to start a podcast. Where do I start? I always say, who's it for, and why are you doing it? So who's it for, and why are you doing it?

Bailey Dietz: Like I said, our blog is a pretty widely known in the SaaS community. So at OpenView, I'll give you a little bit of a background. We're a Boston based venture capital firm that invests in expansion stage software companies. The expansion stage is really anywhere we come in from A to C rounds, just past seed funding and you know, it can fall anywhere in there. And we have about 30 companies in our portfolio, including Datadog, Expensify and Calendly. And the marketing team at OpenView is really here to build OpenView's brand and much of that is through content and events. So our blog runs, we put out, actually, let me start that over because I was just about to say where we put out articles five days a week and now we've just switched strategies. So the marketing team here focuses on building OpenView's brand and much of that is through content and events. We put out new content several times a week and then put it in a roundup in a newsletter that goes out every Saturday morning to over 100,000 subscribers. So we've really had a great base that was already coming to our blog and reading our content and interacting that way. And we use a lot of that content that is targeted to B2B SaaS leaders, can really be in any category from sales to marketing to product. If you check out our blog, you'll see we run the gamut on all the topics that we put on there on a daily basis. So we were trying to capture those people in a different channel. And the main goal was to be in the channel where our readers already were. And that was, you know, to get in their headphones.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Absolutely. One of the things that I would say is where the listeners are, so too go the brands, right? The smart brands, which is stop trying to get them to come to you and go to where they are. So I love that. It makes a lot of sense. Tell me about, you started to get into this, but I would love to know how your podcast fits into your overall content strategy. What do those pieces look like and how does it all fit together?

Bailey Dietz: So we are really lucky at OpenView. We have an incredible team here that goes out and networks with a lot of different people, leaders in the SaaS industry from pretty much any software company that you can think of, we have a contact there, and it's not just someone that you can talk to over email, but we've created really great relationships with them from a business and personal perspective. So we had all of these people who we really wanted to engage with, but didn't necessarily have the time to write content for our blog. So we were thinking, how can we engage with them? Get them not only on our blog, but into again, our listeners headphones. And that was kind of where we saw podcasts come in as a natural fit within the overall strategy. In my mind, it's very easy to get someone on a recording, ask them a few questions. We already knew the story behind many of these companies and how they ended up there. So we were able to put questions together quickly and make it sound super cohesive. So we were able to easily kind of grab those interviewees and it was really cool to see that come together and then from there we were able to create content pieces. So not just again, putting things on our blog, but to take people from our network and kind of give our community an access point to these people that we already had.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Absolutely. So if there was a center to your content strategy, is it around podcasts or does that come second? Where do you start?

Bailey Dietz: I would say our blog is very much where we have started in the past. Our podcast has definitely taken off and it's become much more of a priority. It's funny, we started it as an experiment and I remember the first episode happening and it was between two OpenView employees. And one was sitting in one room and one was sitting in another because we hadn't had our podcast studio set up with two mics yet and it kind of just took off from there. So it was a really cool experiment that we've seen has really stuck, but the blog is very core to what we are still doing today. It's 10 plus years old and we've created this community of people who know that they can go to our website and read content that will, they can get tactical information and key takeaways to help them grow their businesses. That's our ultimate goal. We use the podcast as a way to supplement that goal. So again, connecting the leaders that we know in our network with our community of readers, just in a different channel. So on top of every episode that goes out every Wednesday morning, we also turn those interviews into content pieces and it's still, again, the blog is still very much a core part of what we do in the podcast is a great way to supplement that.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Tell me what your process looks like, like if it were an assembly line, and who's involved, like tell me how it all comes together because you've got a lot of content going on and I know a lot of our listeners can relate.

Bailey Dietz: It's funny, it's taken awhile to actually come up with a process. We at OpenView have a pretty small marketing team. We have two full time employees, myself included, and one co- op designer. So for everyone listening, you do not need a large team to be able to do this, you just need to have a really great process, which we have very much experimented with and iterated on over the past few years. So I would say managing the show, we had to answer the hard question of, do we want to do seasons? Do we want to hire a dedicated host at OpenView? It's not one person's full time job to be a host like they have on The Daily, which would be amazing, but we had to use the resources that we had. So ultimately we came up with the idea of seasons and we asked people here to record at least 10 episodes in their season. So we will sit down with the host and we will come up with the overall theme of what they want their season to be and the potential guests that they want on. Again, we leverage the network and the relationships that we already have, which is super helpful for us. And we go from there and we still go back and forth and we ask, do we really need a dedicated host? Is that what our listeners want to hear? Is that we're to jump from one person to another? From one theme to another? It's something we've been experimenting with, but it's worked for us and for the small team that we do have.

Lindsay Tjepkema: I talk a lot too about seasons. I think that it can be really intimidating to say, how are we going to do a podcast? We can't do one a week, every week, forever and ever. Then don't. Do five shows, do four shows, do 10 shows. We break our podcast up into seasons of 10 shows too. And not only is that easier to take on, but it's also a really nice way, to your point, kind of change things up, whether it's your host or your topic, or your format, the length of the show, to test new things, to see what people like, to focus in on different things that your business is doing. I think that that's, I just commend you for doing that because that's so important and it keeps things interesting.

Bailey Dietz: Yeah, no, it's great. And it's funny because once we ask people to commit to 10 episodes, usually they go back and look at their network and they're like, Oh, I can do 12 or 13, that's not a problem, once they kind of figure out the process. So it is like you said, a really great way to experiment. So once we've gotten all of those things kind of laid out, we work with our ops team to get things scheduled based on recordings and send guests the questions ahead of time. Just a few days ahead. It does require a lot of calendar invites and reminders, but once you really get those down, it's super easy. And we use Zencaster to record all of our remote guests. I know I've heard mixed reviews and anyone who does podcasting, probably, if they've used it has their own opinions on it, but it makes it super easy for us to record from anywhere and I truly think only two or three of our episodes we've been able to have people sit in front of each other and record. So it's a really easy way to get guests from literally anywhere in the world.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Anything from there that you would recommend to listeners to help make their processes smoother or more manageable?

Bailey Dietz: I would say utilize the people in your company or organization. So I used to do all of the scheduling on my own and it got overwhelming with all of the other things I need to get done day to day. So if you have a team that's able to take over people's calendars or take off half of that load, it just makes it so much easier and you're able to get a lot more done or focus more on the questions that you want to ask the person. It just made it so much easier for us.

Lindsay Tjepkema: And how are you equipping your posts, especially since they're rotating. So is there a way that you are helping them to prepare and make sure that they show up as great interviewers?

Bailey Dietz: Yeah. So we give them tips and tricks for asking the right questions. And instead of asking, yes, no questions, have the guest elaborate and a lot of people here are really already great at asking questions, which is super helpful for us. And we have people peruse the last few episodes that we had done on our podcast or podcasts that they really enjoy in the business sector. And if they want to model it after that, it's another experiment that we can run if they wanted to do a shorter recording or a longer recording. Something else that we're also thinking about is do we transition from the interview style to storytelling style? And that's something that we're trying to figure out right now. So we do help them, but we have a lot of great people here who are already great. And as long as you put a calendar invite on their calendar, they know when to send over the questions ahead of time. And we truly have a great team here who is able to make sure they're fully committed to the whole season.

Lindsay Tjepkema: All right, so we talked about how it all came together, how it fits into your strategy, how you're managing the show behind the scenes. But I'd love to know how you're measuring the impact. What does that even look like? Because that's something that a lot of people struggle with.

Bailey Dietz: To be honest, it's something that we struggle with too. So I feel everyone's pain. Our funnel at a VC is a little tricky especially because we're investing at the expansion stage. So at that point, any conversation that we've had with a CEO or a leader in a SaaS business, we've pretty much been talking to for the past year, two years, three years, we already have a pretty good relationship with them. Just because we've been tracking them since they got seed funding. So it's hard to track on our end. Again, I feel everyone's pain. How people come into the funnel. We have kind of made a work around in our Salesforce that if anyone on our investment team is talking to a CEO or someone on the phone, they're able to quickly take notes that says we've got great feedback about a piece of content or the podcast and it's a very kind of high level way for us to track that this podcast people are at least organically finding. We've also worked with our investment team or really anyone who's working with outside organizations at OpenView to make sure that they are somewhat pitching the podcasts or content, but we want to just arm them with really helpful tools that if they're having a conversation about product led growth with a leader, they're able to give them relevant content from our blog and tell them to listen to a few episodes on our podcast. So it's not the easiest thing to do. Again, I totally understand why it's super hard. It's actually a lot of word of mouth. This can be a major con just because it's not easy to track, but our main metric that we're looking at are the number of downloads per episode and per season. We track which guests resonated the most with our audience as well as what season resonated the most. We've had a few seasons and changes at this point. We started with kind of the theme in season one of the first 100 days after a major change in an organization. And that resonated with some people but not others. And we switched to an entire season on pricing, other seasons on product led growth. So we want to track not only the guests that resonated really well with our audience, but also this season as a whole and what we should be doubling down on.

Lindsay Tjepkema: You just started using Casted and some curious what your hopes are for how that might change the way that you look at the impact that you make?

Bailey Dietz: Yeah. So with Casted, it's made it super easy for us to put all of the episodes on one page. I know it sounds super simple, but it was actually a major con for us and it was something that we were trying to solve. We would create individual pages in WordPress based on the seasons, but there was no truly great way for our listeners if they wanted to binge different episodes to be able to do that. So that was actually like very first priority that we needed to get in order that Casted was able to help us with. The second I would say, we really wanted to see how long people are listening to the episode and where our drop- offs were and things like that. We're able to see that on different dashboards, but it's nice to have all of the metrics kind of funneled into one dashboard. And then I would also say the key takeaways have been really great for us to see what people are resonating with. So we have taken the takeaways sporadically throughout the each episode, and we've been able to see what really resonates with people, not just who the guests was, but what they were talking about. And we can easily see the spike in different takeaways and based on what we label them, we're able to see, oh, people really saw that this takeaway resonated within the interview. We should really kind of double down on this next time we're talking about it. So it's been really cool to see that. And then the biggest thing for us, because we have such a huge following on our blog is to be able to show the relevant content that goes along with that podcast episode. So say for example, we had someone on recently from HubSpot, we were able to not only give the key takeaways to our listeners, but also show them resources of all of the times we've talked about HubSpot on our blog and that was relevant to the topic they were discussing. And it's been the easiest thing for us. And that was kind of like one of the other biggest challenges that we were trying to solve is how do you get someone to go from an app on their phone to reading something on our blog? Because we have such a huge following that was a key factor for us and something that was easily solved with Casted.

Lindsay Tjepkema: I love that. And so good to hear because that's, obviously it's really interesting for me to hear how people are using the platform or intending to use the platform, but it's regardless of how, if you're using Casted or not, of course I hope you do, but for everyone listening, I think it's really, really important to think that strategically about how you're going to use that content. So what is the goal? What do we want people to do? How do we want people to behave? What do we want them to do after they listen to this? Where do we want people to come from? And how are we going to leverage this as part of our broader strategy? And I love that that's where your head is at and how you're going to leverage those conversations to really develop engagement with the brand. It's fantastic. Since you're behind the scenes on a great branded podcast, I'd love to hear if you have any parting words or words of encouragement or advice to anyone else who's listening who's also one of those kind of unheard voices behind the mic.

Bailey Dietz: I would say, figure out what style of podcast do you want. The interview style worked really well, just because we had a small team. Like I said, the host would come up with the questions ahead of time and they would riff off of those questions during the recording, which made it super easy for us to have a natural conversation that came from a set of questions so everyone could be prepared ahead of time. If you have more people on your marketing team and you can have a lot more time dedicated to editing, storytelling might be more captivating. One of my favorite podcasts that I listen to is very much more of that storytelling theme and something that I enjoy and it's something that we plan to play around with in upcoming seasons. But it's super difficult if you don't have that time to do all of the editing. One thing that we've done that helps us a lot is actually send all of our editing off to a company called Resonate. Shout out to Resonate, they're great, if you haven't heard of them before, and they do all of the behind the scenes editing just because our team is so small. So that's another hack that you can use if you need it. But I have had my fair share of episodes that I've done by myself in Garage Band. So you can make it work and I had never used it before. So it was a lot of going back and forth trying to figuring out what to do, but it is possible. Another thing that I would say is definitely come up with a playbook and a schedule on how you're going to execute not only each episode, but each season. We made it work with a two person team, but only because we were super organized. So one person would do the scheduling. Another would be on the recording with the host and the guest. And they would work with our editing team once the recording was finished to get everything done on time and ready to go when it would be published and then someone else would be promoting it organically on social. So, the key is to be super aligned from the very beginning of the season and everyone to know what their role is. And my biggest thing is to always, always, always be thinking about the next season. Right when we wrap up from recording one season, we're already pitching the next idea to the next host and figuring out who the guests are going to be and at least getting recordings on the calendar. Doesn't mean they're going to go out anytime soon, but just to have some of them under your belt, when you are ready to release the next season, that has helped us tremendously, just so we don't feel like we're always behind the ball.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Smart. It's very smart. Otherwise you end up with a big gap and then an even bigger gap when you start actually recording.

Bailey Dietz: Exactly. One last thing I would say, like we mentioned before, is to be organized, but to get your organization and your guest involved in promotion. It's something that we are still trying to figure out. We do everything organically on social. We have not dabbled in any ads or paid social for our podcasts yet, but it's something that we are looking into. So basically when a new episode goes out, every Wednesday, we send an email to the entire OpenView team and our guests that include click to tweets that we have people share and LinkedIn posts that we want people to share. And the easier you can make it for people to share these episodes, the better. And they're more likely to actually share it. That's our biggest thing. We actually need people to get engaged. So how do we make their lives easier and what's the easiest way to do that and we found by making click to tweets and LinkedIn posts to share organically on social, we've gotten a lot of great engagement from that.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Yeah, absolutely. I think that that's an often overlooked step because everyone is always thinking about recording and publishing, but to break apart that episode and use it across other channels to bring people back to your content is super, super important.

Bailey Dietz: Exactly.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Well, fantastic. Well, this has been incredibly helpful and I know you give so much, really great tactical advice that other people in your same position can absolutely use. So thank you so much, Bailey. I appreciate your time and sharing your insights from kind of behind the scenes.

Bailey Dietz: Thanks so much for having me.

Lindsay Tjepkema: That's it for today's show. Thank you so much to today's guest and to learn more about them and see Casted in action with clips of today's show and related content, visit casted. us. Thanks so much for listening.